On Feb. 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela and his wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, raise clenched fists as they walk hand-in-hand upon his release from prison in Cape Town, South Africa. / AP photo

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It was a routine press conference at a hotel in Johannesburg, South Africa, in early 1991. I was the Africa correspondent for the Chicago Tribune at the time, and I had raised my hand to ask a question.

Mandela nodded at me and said simply, “Yes, Howard?”

As journalists, we try never to get starry-eyed about the famous people we cover, ever mindful of our responsibilities as neutral observers of the world — and the inevitable fact that every icon, no matter how towering, eventually turns out to have feet of clay.

But I have to confess it was a particularly electric thrill to discover that, in a sea of international journalists covering South Africa at the time, Mandela actually knew who I was and had been reading my stories.

I’ve had the privilege during my career of having reported from more than 70 countries — one-third of all the nations on the planet. I’ve witnessed and chronicled some of the most seminal moments in modern history: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the destruction of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

But I can say that nothing I’ve ever witnessed can match the moment when I watched Mandela walk out of Victor Verster Prison in suburban Cape Town on a brilliant sunny afternoon on Feb. 11, 1990.

A few hours later, before a huge crowd in the city center, the very first public words Mandela spoke, after 27 years in prison, were filled with humility and magnanimity.

“I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all,” Mandela said. “I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people.”

That was the thing about Mandela — he was the real deal. Other politicians have said similar words, feigning modesty to mask their megalomania. But in Mandela’s case, it was genuine — people the world over might have regarded him as a saint or a king, but he would never wear that cloak.

Even after his release from prison, as he deftly negotiated the end of the racist apartheid government and steered his divided nation toward the first democratic elections in its history, Mandela lived in an ordinary home on a hill in Soweto, one of the notorious, teeming black ghettos outside Johannesburg into which white South Africans corralled the nation’s majority residents.

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You could drive up to that house as a tourist and stand in front of the gate to pose for a photo. Sometimes Mandela himself would walk out and greet visitors. I know this because it happened to me one day while I was leading a tour for visiting relatives.

Of course, Mandela did not single-handedly resolve all of South Africa’s profound problems. Terrible paroxysms of violence wracked the country in the months and years after his release, and violent crime remains a plague to this day. South Africa’s vast wealth, built on gold and agriculture and modern industry, remains jaggedly and unevenly divided between whites and blacks.

Some young critics in South Africa today deride Mandela for not having been radical enough, for having negotiated a peaceful democratic transition with the white-ruled government that freed him rather than directing, as he easily could have, its violent overthrow and an abrupt redistribution of wealth.

But most of those critics were too young, a generation ago, to understand the miracle that Mandela accomplished in sparing his nation a bloody civil war. There is a reason why the example of forgiveness, forbearance and steely determination Mandela showed ranks him among the most respected statesmen the world has ever known.

Mandela did not, in fact, turn out to have feet of clay.

And that’s why, in all the houses I have occupied over the last two decades, his portrait has always hung on the wall.